11/29/2025
From Mold to Soul: The Rebirth of Joy Holiday
Harry Chen
What is “cookie-cutter”?
Before I begin the story itself, I want to clarify this American slang term, because it carries a cultural flavor and a bit of generational background.
In American homes, a cookie cutter is the metal mold used to cut cookie dough.
You roll the dough flat, press down, lift it up — and every cookie looks exactly the same.
So the word evolved into slang describing anything that is:
Identical
Uncreative
Soulless
Copy-and-paste
A product stamped out by a mold
In the travel industry, the meaning is even more straightforward:
You can run it today, tomorrow, every week
Same itinerary, same meals, same guide script
Every tour is a copy of the last one
You can think of it as “mass-produced factory travel.”
In American tourism circles, the word often carries a mix of humor, helplessness, and mild disdain.
I once made cookie-cutter tours — but I was never only a cookie-cutter operator
I know very well what cookie-cutter means.
I personally built it once.
But before I talk about the pre-pandemic era, there’s something I must make clear:
Before COVID, I did not only do template tours.
In fact, long before that, I was never satisfied with “just running the Big Three national parks.”
Back in 2004 — during my first era of running Joy Holiday — I realized something:
America has more than sixty national parks.
But within the Chinese-speaking world, people recognized only three:
Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone.
What about the rest?
Are they not worth seeing?
Are they not part of America’s soul?
Are they forgotten simply because no one ever introduced them?
So that year marked the beginning of my first true “anti-cookie-cutter revolution.”
I started creating new routes for Asian American travelers:
The Grand Southwest Circle
Antelope Canyon
White Sands
Glacier
Olympic
Many Native American tribal parks
And the rarely visited American West:
The small national monuments between Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico
The strange landscapes along the Northern California–Nevada border that no one had even heard of
The desert belt stretching from Texas westward into New Mexico and Arizona
And the cultural routes across Texas, New Orleans, and Tennessee
These places are famous today, but in 2004, they were unknown.
There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no social media.
To promote a place no one had heard of, you relied on newspapers, word of mouth, and your own courage.
Those years were tough.
But I kept going, because I believed:
Travel isn’t about taking people to “the hottest spots.”
It’s about taking them to “the places worth seeing.”
And then came another breakthrough: elevating the soul of the tour — the guide
Starting around 2008, I made a decision that shocked many in the industry:
I sent all of my tour guides — including the most experienced ones — back to school.
Not just any school, but ITMI — the International Tour Management Institute.
ITMI is not a typical training program.
It is the premier, one-of-a-kind tour director and tour leader academy in the United States.
Next year marks its 50th anniversary, and in those five decades, ITMI has trained thousands of the industry’s most respected professionals.
And at the heart of ITMI stands its founder and teacher:
Ted Bravos.
Ted is not only a mentor; he is a friend.
A true educator, wise, generous, and deeply supportive.
The kind of person who sees beyond logistics and understands that travel is ultimately about human connection.
No other tour company did what we did:
Joy Holiday became the ONLY company that sent every single guide to ITMI for formal training.
Why?
Because I have always believed:
A guide is not someone who just tells jokes.
A guide is not just a human GPS.
A guide is the soul of the journey.
And Ted Bravels helped me shape that soul.
So my pre-pandemic story is not one of being “good for nothing.”
I was always trying.
Always pushing.
Always believing travel had to mean something.
But template itineraries behave like gravity — if you’re not careful, they pull your entire company into them.
Before COVID, I ran a travel company — and I owned my own bus fleet
Every week, like a predictable artery, more than ten of my buses ran between the major parks:
Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Bryce, Yellowstone, and Antelope Canyon.
The itineraries were as precise as a timetable, as fixed as a shuttle route.
Every year, nearly 20,000 people moved through this conveyor belt I had built.
Back then, I didn’t see a problem.
From a business perspective, anything scalable, replicable, and template-driven is the easiest model to expand.
In the travel industry, that looked like success.
But what is cookie-cutter?
It is running a tour today, tomorrow, ten years later — exactly the same.
No inspiration.
No soul.
No reflection.
Just an SOP that can move bus after bus of people in and out of scenic spots.
That’s exactly what I did.
And I did it extremely well.
But later I realized:
That proficiency was actually a chain.
That efficiency was actually a numbing agent.
Gaining the world also meant losing the soul.
Once, a friend of mine named Roy — who had unknowingly joined one of my bus tours many years ago — told me something funny after the pandemic.
We were chatting, and he said:
“That wasn’t tourism. That was logistics.
On the bus you sleep, off the bus you p*e — just touching the surface of everything.
Super low-end.”
I laughed, shook my head, and said:
“Thankfully, the pandemic unlocked me.”
The pandemic changed the world — and it changed me
When COVID swept across the globe, I lost the machine I thought would accompany me for life.
The buses stopped.
The tours stopped.
The company stopped.
The outer world came to a halt — and my inner world finally started running.
Sometimes life is like that:
You think you are drowning, but you’re actually being reborn.
You think what you lost was support, but it was actually your chain.
Without the buses, I finally asked myself a question I had avoided for years:
Was I truly doing travel —
or was I just doing transportation?
It was the quietest — and loudest — moment of my life.
When all the template tours collapsed instantly, I suddenly realized:
I had also been living inside a template.
Repeating routes that required no soul.
Running a business that could be duplicated by software.
I suddenly understood:
If tourism becomes something that can only be mass-produced, cut, and priced into the ground,
then it will collapse into a race to the bottom.
Travelers will lose trust and choose self-guided trips.
Guides, narratives, warmth — all abandoned.
It’s not that group tours are bad.
It’s that cookie-cutter destroyed travelers’ trust in them —
leaving “do-it-yourself” as the only choice.
But that’s not travel.
That’s just movement.
And COVID taught me something important:
Movement takes your body out.
Travel brings your soul back.
After the pandemic, I finally realized: travel cannot be quantified or mass-produced
Every business wants scale, templates, systems.
But tourism, once over-quantified, loses its soul.
It requires craftsmanship, personality, soul, and story.
Travel should be:
Someone helping you understand culture
Someone guiding you through history
Someone opening doors you could never find alone
Someone making you feel safe
Someone making you laugh
Someone giving you stability in a foreign land
Someone removing burdens
Someone giving human warmth
These are the true values of tourism hospitality.
Cookie-cutter tricked people into believing that group tours were only “sleep on the bus, p*e off the bus.”
So people ran toward DIY travel, carrying every burden on their own shoulders.
The problem was never group travel.
The problem was soulless products.
And only after COVID did I truly understand:
This — this — is the value of travel.
And this is what the travel industry was originally meant to protect.
This is how the new Joy Holiday was born
I didn’t break the mold by choice.
The world shattered the mold for me.
When the pieces hit the ground, I finally saw what I had always wanted to do — but never had the courage or opportunity to attempt.
I realized I had always wanted to create not itineraries, but journeys.
Not sightseeing stops, but stories.
Not transportation, but understanding.
Not cookie-cutter products, but curated experiences.
This is the essence of Joy Holiday in the post-pandemic era:
Rescuing travel from molds.
Putting the soul back into the journey.
I no longer want itineraries that can run three times a day, where every driver knows every turn and every guide knows the next line by heart.
I want to create:
A road that touches life
A journey that changes people
A story that situates you in the world again
A moment you’ll remember years later
These journeys aren’t fast, easy, or cheap.
But they are worth doing.
Joy Holiday didn’t become better because of the pandemic.
It became better because the pandemic finally pushed us back to the essence of travel.
Travel is a major event in life
And cookie-cutter tourism can produce itineraries —
but it cannot produce stories.
It can put people on a bus —
but it cannot take away their regret.
It can achieve efficiency —
but not meaning.
I am not saying template tours are bad.
I relied on them for years.
They had their time, and they met a real market need.
But after the pandemic,
the world has changed,
hearts have changed,
and tourism must change.
The road Joy Holiday now walks is not the biggest or the fastest —
but it is the road that aligns most closely with
the true meaning of travel.
Because life itself is not pressed out of a mold.
Travel definitely shouldn’t be either.
Harry Chen
Thanksgiving 2025
